Premier must pick new deputy minister wisely

Moe should go in different direction, hire someone outside political loop

It will likely receive little or no attention, but Premier Scott Moe’s choice for his new deputy minister may be his most important decision right now.

Specifically, the question for Moe is whether he succumbs to the temptation of appointing a political partisan as deputy minister or opts for a career civil servant.

It’s a big decision. Who Moe selects to be closest to his ear is a big deal.

This is not to say that there isn’t a time or place for a more partisan person in the role of executive council deputy minister, or that the DM to the premier can’t be both a little partisan and a lot competent. There are many examples of past NDP, Progressive Conservative and now Sask. Party premiers successfully utilizing individuals who happened to be partisan.

Nor should we condemn the last choice as deputy minister to the premier — Alanna Koch, who was runner-up to Moe in the Jan. 27 Sask. Party leadership race.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Koch is a person of considerable ability, who served as deputy minister of agriculture and then as former premier Brad Wall’s deputy minister from May 2016 until her leadership run in the fall of 2017. Under Koch’s direction, there was male-female parity in the deputy minister complement.

However, that didn’t necessarily make her the right deputy minister for the Sask. Party government for the time, largely because of her partisan background that eventually led her to seek the premier’s office.

One certainly couldn’t fault Koch for the political and budgetary problems at the end of Wall’s tenure that were long in the making. Nevertheless, it also can’t be denied that there were questions around choices made — a big one being the 2017-18 budget with its drastic cuts and its even bigger, disastrous plan to decrease remuneration in the public sector by 3.5 per cent.

Whatever it was that went wrong in the Sask. Party government during the final months of Wall’s tenure likely had something to do with all governments after a while — the penchant to become increasingly insular in the decision-making process. The unsustainable, politically driven wage cut was one such problem.

Again, Koch can’t be held responsible for the civil service wage cut (something she didn’t campaign on during her leadership bid). But if the problem for Wall and the Sask. Party after 10 years in government was unworkable policy, perhaps the source of that problem was Wall’s dependence on a cabal of like-thinkers (as talented as they might have been) in executive council who too easily agreed with him.

That Koch would attempt the unprecedented step from chief bureaucrat to the premier’s office, and that we are still talking about her in the context of her severance package, only underscores the need for Moe to go in a different direction in his DM hiring.

A premier’s deputy minister must be part of the solution, not part of the problem. It’s why DMs usually do come from the bureaucracy.

For the bulk of the past two decades, the premier’s office and public of Saskatchewan were well served by two crackerjack, career civil servants as deputy ministers to premiers in Dan Perrins (who served Lorne Calvert from 2001 to 2007) and Doug Moens (who served Wall from 2009 to 2016).

That doesn’t mean other premiers’ DMs who came from the academic world, like Garnet Garven (Wall’s first DM from 2007 to 2009) or Greg Marchildon, who served Roy Romanow from 1997 to 2000) didn’t bring considerable skills to the table.

Nor is it to suggest that occasionally utilizing more partisan-minded people with credentials — as Grant Devine did in hiring Derek Bedson and Larry Martin or past NDP governments did with hiring Murray Wallace, Wes Bolstad or Frank Bogdasavich — was necessarily wrong. Political DMs are often hired during government transition periods.

But given Moe’s needs, the next chief adviser to the premier should come from outside political circles.